What, in your opinion, is the best search engine? I like to find out obscure stuff, usually about history. But I was wondering about an all in all great engine.
I started with Lycos, have jumped to Yahoo now and then, but recently I’ve been using WebFerret. WebFerret will search about a dozen search engines like Lycos and will do boolean expressions.
Started with Webcrawler back in '94-'95 or so, then switched to Altavista. Switched to Northernlight in '99. Currently using Google, which is blazingly fast in addition to being reasonably accurate (for a search engine.)
Metacrawler, Dogpile, or Google…
I use Dogpile, almost exclusively.
Works wonderfully, plus I like how it asks me to “Fetch!”
Scotti
I have tried several. I started using Lycos. It is still vey good. I, then, went to AltaVista. Too many adds, long searches. Now, I am hooked on Google! Super fast and no damn ads!
If I want something broken out into different groupings, I use Northern Light.
the handsome groom-guy mr. obfusciatrist pointed me to it back when they were barely into beta mode. Been using it daily since.
It’s nice being able to avoid all the vanity sites that nobody else reads.
Another vote for Google. Practically the only one I use now. By far the most accurate, and it lets you view cached pages in case the page you wanted came down.
Runners up:
Yahoo – the directory format makes searching by subject easier.
Alltheweb – the best for non-U.S. websites
Northern Lights – groups results by subject
Copernic – not a site, but software. Nice metasearch.
Dogpile – good metasearch, though not like Copernic, which lists all hits by relevance, no matter which search engine they come from.
I use metacrawler mainly, dogpile occasionally. I am getting tired of metacrawler though because half of the hits are results from another search engine (about.com). I have heard good things about google, though I have never tried it.
Umm, * all * their hits are from other search engines…that’s what it does…
Of course, it depends on what you’re going for… google is great for finding the official site of a group/organization, but not as good for some other things. Of course, I really like the irony here:
I while back, it was reported that if you type in “more evil than Satan himself” into Google, hit #1 was Microsoft…
…Now, microsoft has moved to about #16 behind references to that fact…
Yeah, I was unclear in my post. What I meant was this:
You do a search in metacrawler. It brings up n hits. You click the first link in the returned list. It brings up NOT a page on the topic you searched for but the about.com results page for searching the same keyword. So the about.com results is a hit on a metacrawler search. Extra layers I do not want. I hope this makes it clearer what I was trying to say, though probably not.
Thanks, I knew you would know some new and exciting engines for me to try:)
I’m a big fan of google myself. It’s fast, it’s not cluttered with other “stuff”, and it generally gives me what I wanted in the first screen or two. Yahoo’s a far second, good mostly for it’s categories.
My search engine depends on what I’m looking for. Normally I use Momma. Most of the time, whatever I want comes up on the first page. If I’m really trying to dig deep, and not much is coming up on Momma, then I switch to Altavista or Profusion. Profusion is actually really good. I also like the option of opening a new browser window with each page that I find on there, so I can just close it if it’s not what I want, and I’m still at the original search page.
I use Infoseek and Northern Light. Northern Light is the better of the 2.
One thought:
There’s a search engine that uses meaning based searches:
http://www.oingo.com
It’s not too good, but very usefull if you’re searching for a common word with two meanings like “bat”.
For really finding stuff (looking info up, etc.) I like Google as well. But for really odd and random things, I like Yahoo.
I’m particular to Google for just general searches. For more detailed queried stuff, I use dmoz.
In order of preference: Dogpile, Altavista, and Lycos. I haven’t used Yahoo in at least a year since it never came up with any search results for me. Admittedly, I have odd interests, but still…
Northern Light is pretty good for newspaper articles as well.
–tygre